This is an argument or proof that is based on Reason.
It is an a posteriori argument

and by that is meant that it proceeds after

considering the
existence of the physical universe.

The
Cosmological Argument

This argument or proof proceeds from a consideration
of the existence and order of
the universe. This popular argument for the existence
of God is most commonly known as the cosmological
argument. Aristotle, much like a natural scientist, believed that we could
learn about our world and the very essence of things within our world
through observation. As a marine biologist might observe and catalog
certain marine life in an attempt to gain insight into that specific
thing's existence, so too did Aristotle observe the physical world around
him in order to gain insight into his world. The very term cosmological
is a reflection of Aristotle's relying upon sense data and observation.
The word logos suggests a study
of something while the noun cosmos
means order or the way things are. Thus, a cosmological
argument for the existence of God will study the order of things or
examine why things are the way they are in order to demonstrate the
existence of God.

For Aristotle, the existence of the universe needs an
explanation, as it could not have come from nothing. There needs to
be a cause for the universe. Nothing comes from nothing so since
there is something there must have been some other something that is its
cause. Aristotle rules out an infinite progression of causes, so that
led to the conclusion that there must be a First Cause. Likewise
with Motion, there must have been a First Mover.

This
argument was given support by modern science with the idea of the universe
originating in a BIG BANG, a single event from a single point.

Thomas
Aquinas offered
five somewhat similar arguments using ideas of the first mover, first
cause, the sustainer, the
cause of excellence, the source of harmony

Here
is a sample of the pattern:

there exists a series of events

the series of events exists as caused and not
as uncaused(necessary)

there must exist the necessary being that is
the cause of all contingent being

there must exist the necessary being that is
the cause of the whole series of beings

First Way:
The Argument From Motion

Aquinas had Five Proofs for the Existence of God. Let
us consider his First argument, the so-called Argument from Motion.
Aquinas begins with an observation:

Of
the things we observe, all things have been placed in motion.
No thing has placed itself in motion.

Working from the assumption that if a thing is
in motion then it has been
caused to be in motion by
another thing, Aquinas also notes that an infinite chain of things-in-motion
and things-causing-things-to-be-in-motion
can not be correct. If an infinite chain or regression existed among
things-in-motion and
things-causing-things-to-be-in-motion
then we could not account for the motion
we observe. If we move backwards from the things we observe in motion
to their cause, and then to that cause of motion
within those things that caused motion,
and so on, then we could continuing moving backwards ad infinitum. It
would be like trying to count all of the points in a line segment, moving
from point B to point A. We would never get to point A. Yet point A must
exist as we know there is a line segment. Similarly, if the
cause-and-effect chain did not have a starting point then we could not
account for the motion we
observe around us. Since there is motion,
the cause and effect chain (accounting for motion)
must have had a starting point. We now have a second point:

The
cause and effect relationship among things-being-moved and things-moving
must have a starting point. At one point in time, the relationship was set
in motion. Thus, there must be a First Cause which set all other things in motion.

What else can we know about the First Cause? The
first cause must have been uncaused. If it were caused by another thing,
then we have not resolved the problem of the infinite regression. So, in
order to account for the motion
that we observe, it is necessary to posit a beginning to the cause and
effect relationship underlying the observed motion.
It is also necessary to claim that the First Cause has not been caused by
some other thing. It is not set in motion
by another entity.

The
First Cause is also the Unmoved Mover. The Unmoved Mover is that being whom
set all other entities in motion
and is the cause of all other beings. For Aquinas, the Unmoved Mover is
that which we call God.

For Aquinas the
term motion meant not
just motion as with billiard balls moving from point A to point B or a
thing literally moving from one place to another. Another sense of the
term motion is one that
appreciates the Aristotelian sense of moving from a state of potentiality
towards a state of actuality. When understood in this way, motion
reflects the becoming inherent in the world around us. God as First Cause
becomes that entity which designed and set in motion all things in their quest to become. In the least, it
is a more poetic understanding of motion.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) was a theologian, Aristotelian scholar, and
philosopher. Called the Doctor
Angelicus (the Angelic Doctor,) Aquinas is considered one the greatest
Christian philosophers to have ever lived.

Much of St. Thomas's thought is an attempt to
understand Christian orthodoxy in terms of Aristotelian philosophy. His
five proofs for the existence of God take "as givens" some of
Aristotle's assertions concerning being and the principles of being (the
study of being and its principles is known as metaphysics
within philosophy). Before analyzing further the first of Aquinas' Five
Ways, let us examine some of the Aristotelian underpinnings at work
within St. Thomas' philosophy.

Aristotle
and Aquinas also believed in the importance of the senses and sense data
within the knowing process.
Aquinas once wrote nothing in the
mind that was not first in the senses. Those who place priority upon
sense data within the knowing process are known as empiricists. Empirical data is that which can be sensed and
typically tested. Unlike Anselm, who was a rationalist,
Aquinas will not rely on non-empirical evidence (such as the definition of
the term "God" or "perfection") to demonstrate God's
existence. St. Thomas will observe the physical world around him and,
moving from effect to cause, will try try to explain why things are the
way they are. He will assert God as the ultimate Cause of all that is. For
Aquinas, the assertion of God as prima
causa (first cause) is not so much a blind religious belief but a
philosophical and theoretical necessity. God as first cause is at the very heart of St. Thomas' Five
Ways and his philosophy in general.

One last
notion that is central to St. Thomas' Five
Ways is the concept of potentiality and actuality. Aristotle
observed that things/substances strive from an incomplete state to a
complete state. Things will grow and tend to become as they exist. The
more complete a thing is, the better an instance of that thing it is. We
have idioms and expressions within our language that reflect this idea.
For example, we might say that so-and-so has a lot of potential. We might
say that someone is at the peak of their game or that someone is the best
at what they do. We might say It just does not get any better than this if we are are having a
very enjoyable time. Aristotle alludes to this commonly held intuition
when he speaks of organisms moving from a state of potentiality to
actuality. When Aquinas speaks of motion within the First
Way (the cosmological
argument) he is referencing the Aristotelian concepts of potentiality and
actuality.

English theologian and
philosopher Samuel Clarke set forth a second variation of the Cosmological
Argument, which is considered to be a superior version. It is called the “Argument from Contingency”.

Clarke’s “Argument from Contingency”:

1. Every being that exists is either contingent or necessary.

2. Not every being can be contingent.

3. Therefore, there exists a necessary being on which the contingent
beings depend.

4. A necessary being, on which all contingent things depend, is what
we mean by “God”.

5. Therefore, God exists.

However, there are several
weaknesses in the Cosmological Argument, which make it unable to
“prove” the existence of God by itself. One is that if it is not possible for a person to conceive of an
infinite process of causation, without a beginning, how is it possible for
the same individual to conceive of a being that is infinite and without
beginning? The idea that
causation is not an infinite process is being introduced as a given,
without any reasons to show why it could not exist.

Clarke (1675-1729) has offered a version of the Cosmological
Argument, which many philosophers consider superior. The “Argument from Contingency” examines how every being
must be either necessary or contingent. Since not every being can be contingent, it follow that there must
be a necessary being upon which all things depend. This being is God. Even
though this method of reasoning may be superior to the traditional
Cosmological Argument, it is still not without its weaknesses. One of its weaknesses has been called the “Fallacy of
Composition”. The form of
the mistake is this: Every
member of a collection of dependent beings is accounted for by some
explanation. Therefore, the
collection of dependent beings is accounted for by one explanation. This argument will fail in trying to reason that there is only one
first cause or one necessary cause, i.e. one God .

There
are those who maintain that there is no sufficient reason to believe that
there exists a self existent being.

COUNTER
ARGUMENTS:

1.
If there is a cause for everything then what caused the first cause (god).

2.If
the first cause can be thought to be uncaused and a necessary being
existing forever, then why not consider that the universe itself has
always existed and shall always exist and go through a never ending cycle
of expansion and contraction and then expansion (big bang) again and
again!!!

If there is to be a deity that is the exception from the
requirement that all existing things need a cause then the same exception
can be made for the sum of all energy that exists, considering that it
manifests in different forms.

What the counter argument does is to indicate that the
premises of the cosmological argument do not necessarily lead to the
conclusion that there is a being that is responsible for the creation of the
universe.

3) Further, even if a person wanted to accept that there
was such a being there is nothing at all in the cosmological argument to
indicate that the being would have any of the properties of humans that are
projected into the concept of the deity of any particular religion. The
first mover or first cause is devoid of any other characteristic.

So the cosmological argument is neither a valid argument
in requiring the truth of its conclusion nor is it a satisfactory argument
to prove the existence of any being that would have awareness of the
existence of the universe or any event within it.

When a person asks questions such as :

1 What is the cause of the the energy or the force or the
agent behind the expansion and contraction of the energy? These questions are considered as "loaded questions" because
they loaded or contain assumptions about what exists or is true that have
not yet been established. Why is it that the idea of a "force " or agent"
is even in the question? Why operate with the assumption that there is such
or needs to be such?

We do not know that there is a force "behind" the
expansion and contraction. Energy might just expand and contract and there
is no force at all other than those generated by the energy-gravitational
force, electro magnetic, strong and weak forces.

In another form this is the "who made god?" question or
the" who made the energy question?" question. Such an approach to the issue
of an explanation for the existence of the universe assumes that there must
be an agency. When the idea of an eternal and necessary agency is
introduced it was done to provide a form for describing a being that some
people wanted as the ultimate explanation- a deity. The point of the
counter arguments to the cosmological argument is that the idea of an
eternal and necessary agency can as logically be expressed as energy rather
than as a single being or entity. If the uncaused cause can be thought of a
a single entity then the uncaused cause can be thought of a a single
process-energy.

Here is another view of this argument and the
rebuttal:

PREMISES:

there exists a series of events

the series of events exists as caused and not as
uncaused (necessary)

there must exist the necessary being that is the
cause of all contingent being

CONCLUSION: There must exist the necessary being that
is the cause of the whole series of beings

PREMISES:

1.RULE: Everything that exists must have a cause

2.the Universe (multiverse) exists

3.the universe (multiverse) must have a cause

CONCLUSION:

The cause of the universe (multiverse) is GOD

REBUTTAL:

1.BUT what is the cause of GOD?

2.God has no cause but is a necessary being. GOD is
an EXCEPTION to RULE !

REBUTTAL: If GOD can be the exception then why not
ENERGY???

Clarke’s “Argument from Contingency”:

1. Every being that exists is either contingent or
necessary.

2. Not every being can be contingent.

3. Therefore, there exists a necessary being on
which the contingent beings depend.

4. A necessary being, on which all contingent
things depend, is what we mean by “God”.

CONCLUSION: Therefore, God exists.

REBUTTAL:

Why not have that a necessary being on which the
contingent beings depend is ENERGY itself that changes its form through
time? PANTHEISM

2.) A refutation of the argument by William Lane Craig is
offered by Arnold T. Guminski, The Kalam Cosmological Argument: The
Question of the Metaphysical Possibility of an Infinite Set of Real
Entities in PHILO, Volume 5, Number 2 at
http://philoonline.org/library/guminski_5_2.htm

Abstract:
This paper examines the Kalam Cosmological Argument, as expounded
by William Lane Craig, insofar as it pertains to the premise that
it is metaphysically impossible for an infinite set of real
entities to exist. Craig contends that this premise is justified
because the application of the Cantorian theory to the real world
generates counterintuitive absurdities. This paper shows that
Craig’s contention fails because it is possible to apply Cantorian
theory to the real world without thereby generating
counterintuitive absurdities, provided one avoids positing that an
infinite set of real entities is technically a set within the
meaning of such theory. Accordingly, this paper proposes an
alternative version of the application of Cantorian theory to
the real world thereby replacing the standard version of
such application so thoroughly criticized by Craig.

Why is there
something rather than nothing ?" and the answer might be because nothing
is an unstable state.

Chapter in The Improbability of God, eds. Michael Martin and Ricki
Monnier (Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 2006). Based on a chapter in God:
The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist by
Victor J. Stenger, to be published by Prometheus Books in 2007.

So there are those who would argue that the universe
has always existed: that the sum of all energy has always existed and
that it manifests itself in different forms over time.

Abstract:
William Lane Craig claims that the doctrine of creation ex
nihilo is strongly supported by the Big Bang theory of the
origin of the universe. In the present paper, I critically examine
Craig’s arguments for this claim. I conclude that they are
unsuccessful, and that the Big Bang theory provides no support for
the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Even if it is granted
that the universe had a “first cause,” there is no reason to think
that this cause created the universe out of nothing. As far as the
Big Bang theory is concerned, the cause of the universe might have
been what Adolf Grünbaum has called a “transformative cause”—a
cause that shaped something that was “already there.”

Abstract: Atheists have
tacitly conceded the field to theists in the area of philosophical
cosmology, specifically, in the enterprise of explaining why the
universe exists. The theistic hypothesis is that the reason the
universe exists lies in God's creative choice, but atheists have
not proposed any reason why the universe exists. I argue that
quantum cosmology proposes such an atheistic reason, namely, that
the universe exists because it has an unconditional probability of
existing based on a functional law of nature. This law of nature
("the wave function of the universe") is inconsistent with theism
and implies that God does not exist. I criticize the claims of
Alston, Craig, Deltete and Guy, Oppy and Plantinga that theism is
consistent with quantum cosmology.

Nothing can come from nothing is a fairly well accepted
principle since Parmenides. In the West it is taken to be used to
support the idea that the universe must have had a creator or a maker or
source or origin. However, that is due to the prior storied of a
creator being that sets the intellectual environment in which thinking
takes place. Now in the East and now in the West there are alternative
approaches to the explanation of the universe that we experience.
Nothing comes from nothing.
Something does exist.
Therefore, has never been nothing.
It is possible that the something that currently exists has always
existed.
The something that exists is always changing.
Change is a feature of something. --Process Philosophy

The East has had such notions for millennium. In the West there are now
alternative cosmologies to account for the cosmos--M theory is one of
them. A flaw in the cosmological argument is in giving special exclusive
status to a deity that would need no creator or origin outside of
itself- a necessary being--without acknowledging that such status could
be given to the basic stuff, physis, of the universe, its energy, that
can take different forms.. What the western thinkers omitted as a
possibility was the alternative that there is energy that has always
existed and undergoes changes that are time and it can expand and
contract and generate multiple dimensions. The Hindus and Buddhists
have this sort of idea and so to the Taoists.

If people need to believe that there
was an origination for the universe and that the origination involves an
eternal entity then you can have several possibilities including these:

What if this universe we know with solar systems and
galaxies and dark matter and dark energy is but one of an infinite number of
universes with differing amounts of energy and all in a tremendous amount of
energy that gives birth to universes constantly over time and each with
different amounts of energy and with forces operating differently so that
some have formation of matter and others do not?

Many people appear to want to personify
that which they would hold in highest esteem. They appear to prefer the
options that enable them to think of the eternal entity as a being such as
themselves so that they can relate to it and even worship it and petition
it.

The critics of the
argument point out that if the believers in a deity can make an
exception to the rule that everything needs a cause for the deity then
an exception can be made for the universe itself. If the deity can be
thought of as being uncaused and eternal then so can the energy that
makes up the universe be thought of that way-as uncaused and eternal but
manifesting in different forms, as dimensions of a universe or in
multiple dimensions or branes leading to numerous BIG BANG over time..

What if this universe we know with solar systems and galaxies and dark
matter and dark energy is but one of an infinite number of universes with
differing amounts of energy and all in a tremendous amount of energy that
gives birth to universes constantly over time and each with different
amounts of energy and with forces operating differently so that some have
formation of matter and others do not?

Outcome Assessment

This argument or proof does not
establish the actual existence of a supernatural deity. It attempts
to argue for the existence of such a being by making exceptions to rules
in the argument and that is not rationally legitimate. While the argument can not be used to convert
a non-believer to a believer, the faults in the argument do not prove that
there is no god. The
Burden of Proof demands that the positive claim that there is a

supernatural deity
be established by reason and evidence and this argument does not meet that
standard. The believer
in god can use the argument to establish the mere logical possibility that there is a

supernatural deity
or at least that it is not irrational to believe in
the possibility that there is such a being.
The argument does not establish any degree of probability at all
when there are alternative explanations for the existence of the known
universe.

OUTCOME:

This argument or proof has flaws in it and would not convince a rational
person to accept its conclusion. This is not because someone who
does not believe in a deity will simply refuse to accept based on
emotions or past history but because it is not rationally compelling of
acceptance of its conclusion.